This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning and welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple. As many of you know, We are in the midst of a three-week intensive. We've finished the second week with Shashin to come next week. And then in the midst of that intensive, just a period of time to where a number of us are following a schedule of meditation and silence and study. A wonderful thing to do. somewhat challenging and somewhat delightful.

[01:04]

You know, it's a wonderful gift to find a way to dip time into our lives, start to explore and discover the intentionality of our life that we can live by, to start to discover the purposefulness of our life that our life's work can express. such important ingredients in living a life, and yet they can so easily be elusive, be pushed aside in the service of more pressing agendas. And of course, those pressing agendas are not in opposition to the intention and purpose of our life. asking us to discover how they are completely contained within it.

[02:09]

And that's what I'd like to talk about this morning. Within this paradigm of the intensive, what you might call the straight line of practice. Staying present. Staying open. Meeting each breath, each person, each moment. And tragically, sadly, someone living here committed suicide and set forth, for those of us connected to his life, shockwaves of sadness, disbelief, disarray. reminding us that no matter how diligently we practice, it can't sanitize our life.

[03:15]

It can't provide us with some certainty of predictability or security. That we are indeed obliged to open up to the fullness of what life has to offer. Pablo Neroda put it like this, he says, Let it be that the life we search for, worn with hands obligation, as by acids steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of lilies and urine. spattered diversely by the trades we live by, inside the law and beyond it, a life impure as the clothing we wear, or the bodies, soup stained, soiled by our shameful behavior, our wrinkles, our vigils, our dreams, observations and prophecies, declarations of loathing and love, ideals and beasts, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denials and doubts,

[04:34]

Affirmations and taxes. Yeah. Something about when you hear the enormity of it, you can relax. Okay, then. This is not going to be need entirely. so I don't have to worry about that. I can mark that off. Make my life neat and tidy. It's not going to happen. It's like that realization after you've done a couple of periods of Zazen and realize it's not a neat and tidy process. Our intention can be sustained our effort can be sustained but what comes up goes all over the place the straight line of our life has a million deviations this is doesn't can we open up so that those deviations

[06:06]

are held in the view of practice too. They're just another variation on a theme. You know, whether they're loathing or love, taxes or affirmations, denials or doubts. Each arising is asking not just that we open up, not just that we let something in us that's resisting, ignoring, neglecting, that we let it soften. That in the alchemy of our inner being, we discover some form of willingness. some form of courage.

[07:07]

So as a community here at City Center and all the many people who practice here, discovering how to have that courage, how to have that willingness, that openness to hold the stark, terrible truth that someone committed suicide. And for us, as I think for many of us in our lives, when something extraordinarily painful, disruptive, challenging happens, there's shock. Someone told me once that in his master's thesis, he studied people's initial response when they received bad news.

[08:18]

The initial response of most people is no or oh no. It's like this tender vulnerability of our life. the shock, let the shock waves ripple through us. To not ignore, neglect, or resist. Whether we can realize it in the moment or not, let something of the simple intentionality of life express itself. that being alive is being alive to now.

[09:24]

However, now presents itself. So in a way, the ferocity of an ever-changing world is constantly challenging us to open and accept what's going on. And to let that acceptance become our teacher, and in a strange way, our support. As we start to discover, it's not in opposition to sustaining our life. It's actually how we're going to discover how to sustain our life.

[10:32]

It's the resistance, it's the ignoring, it's the neglect that burden our life. Last week, talking about this, I read a poem, Tell Me What You Do When You Get Lost. And the emphasis on the poem, tell me. Can there be acknowledgement? Can there be communication? Can we make some kind of contact with who we are, what we are, the people we're living with? and what it all means to us and how we feel it and experience it. The steady request of what's happening now. And as people who practice with me know, I like to use that as an exercise.

[11:43]

Just simply asking, what's happening now? What's happening now? And you discover everything in its own jumbled up order is happening now. And as those shock waves reverberate and you feel, start to make contact with a very human response, sense of loss that sense of the fabric of life being torn asunder bent out of shape in how to discover it's taking a new shape it's reshaping it's rediscovering

[12:47]

which is a very delicate process. You know? The very notion reminded me of this rather fierce poem. I was born and grew up in a city that was torn by sectarian violence. which many of our cities across the globe are torn by then and now. And someone wrote this poem. It was Belfast in Northern Ireland. Progress. It's by Alan Gillis. They say that for years Belfast was backwards. and it's great now to see some progress.

[13:52]

So I guess we can look forward to taking boxes from the earth. I guess that ambulances will leave the dying back amidst the rubble to be explosively healed. Given time, a hundred thousand particles of glass will create impossible patterns in the air before coalescing into the clarity of a window, through which A reassembled body will look out and admire the shy young man taking his bomb from the building and driving home. Part of the fierceness of life is we can't put it back together the way it was in those golden days before now. We move forward. We take what we have and we hold it with compassion, with courage, with patience, with wisdom.

[15:02]

And in the holding, something's reshaped, something's discovered about how to move forward. And in a way, this is no different from every period of meditation We have sat or we will sit. Our sincere intention is met by the urgent disorder of our life, our mind, our feelings, our memories, our anticipations. They demand attention. We can try to neglect, ignore, resist, the world they create, where we can discover how to meet it, how to be present for it, how in that presence, in that meeting, how to take the next breath, how to be available for what happens now.

[16:14]

In Zazen, we discover something extraordinarily fundamental about living a life. We discover that visceral sense of willingness to experience, of letting the body breathe, of letting the utter disorder of thoughts and feelings be held with awareness. And we discover that our life moves forward. It's as in practice, no matter how sincere, how dedicated, how concentrated, will not restore it to some previous state of order, or not even assure some future state of order. But amazingly, it will start to inform us about the intentionality of living a life and the purposefulness that a life can be shaped on.

[17:37]

That that purposefulness that will show us what's asking to be expressed in our life's work. What could be more valuable as we face the ever-changing world we live in? So in our community, holding the first meeting we had, there were long stretches of silence. Some people told me that they were confused, even a little upset by that, looking at it, thinking, don't these people care? Don't they have feelings?

[18:38]

To me it was more, and I think for many people in the room, the enormity of the situation. The enormity intensity of our feelings was too big for us to know exactly how to wrap it inside words and ideas. We could speak of it in vignettes. But the words, under the words, the ideas, the sentiments underneath what we were seeing kept drawing us back into a silence, a witnessing, a holding, a place of knowing that this is a time of not knowing, not knowing what to do, not knowing what's next.

[19:52]

but holding still, letting something in its tenderness reverberate, discover itself. Letting something in its tenderness start to experience, what is this new world? How shall we relate to it? How shall we relate to each other? So the inner work of practice is to discover the simple, conceptually simple, but within the forces of our life, elusive and subtle, And a simple work of practice is that we let the force of life continually open us, invite us into presence that's bigger than the thoughts we have about it.

[21:14]

To not simply live a life dictated by our Resistance and avoidance. But that's what turns the circumstances of life into a burden, into something like a heavy weight we then carry on our back, like a bitter memory that we try not to think of. a disappointment, we hold with resentment. Maybe somehow evoking, as Alan Guinness plays with, this notion that things can all go back and just be put back together exactly as it were.

[22:20]

And my observation of Northern Ireland is things are going quite well. You dare not use the word progress, right? Discovering, how do you knit back together a community that's torn itself apart with violence, with bombs, with shootings, with beatings, with riots? How do you begin to heal? Get people to talk to each other. So this is our world. Just look at the stories of the last week. Of Africa. Of the Middle East. Of Norway. Something in our being anguishes.

[23:33]

over our sense of separation, and strikes out as a consequence. Whether we're talking about a very personal, intimate process that we go through ourself, or whether we're talking about our global society. They're just different modalities of this experience. How do we turn towards, meet, discover how to go forward? So in Carol Zippert's poem that I read last week, tell me, acknowledge, notice, open to, experience. Pueblo Neruda.

[24:37]

Full catastrophe living. I'd like to read one more poem by Mary Oliver. As she dares to mention the intentionality and purposefulness she tries to bring to her life. It's the last part of In Blackwater Woods. Every year, everything I have learned in my lifetime leads me back to this. Every year, everything I've learned in my lifetime brings me back to this. How would you finish that? What would you say? What would follow on from there?

[25:42]

Well, that's easy. I know exactly what that is. It's not a matter of knowing exactly what it is. It's a matter of letting that request draw out of you maybe something that surprises you. It's letting... a certain kind of ability be exercised. Respecting and trusting your own inner wisdom. Discovering how to dip into something and let today's answer come forth. What is it I live by? Every year, everything I've ever learned in this lifetime comes back to this.

[26:49]

The fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation. The other side of loss is salvation. Whose meaning none of us will ever know. We'll never have this all wrapped up inside ideas and meaning. It's not something we figure out. It's something we live through. You don't figure out a loss in your life. You live it. You open to it. You let it reshape what it needs to reshape and reveal what it needs to reveal. To live in this world, you must be able to do three things.

[27:54]

How fierce. You must be able to do three things. To love what is mortal. What is not mortal? What is not subject to change? What is not going to come apart? Sometimes with an aching predictability, sometimes with a shocking abruptness. To love what is mortal. To hold it against your bones. Knowing your own life depends on it. Can we take that risk?

[28:57]

Let something get that close to us. Let something be that intimate. Let someone be that intimate. Let life itself be that intimate. To hold it against your bones, knowing your life depends on it. Your own life depends on it. And when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. This great paradox of an impermanent life. That to live it we have to give ourselves to it. To love someone you have to give yourself to them. It's a risky business. And when it's time to let it go, let it go.

[30:02]

And as I say, every period of zazen, maybe we'd like to think that the occurrences of zazen, the thoughts, the feelings, the jumping of attention from this to that, the moments of mysterious unawareness, maybe we'd like to think Well, that's what happens in Zazen, but the rest of my life, I've got all that taken care of. And yet also to remember this utterly paradoxical way in which right in the middle of that is, as Mary Oliver calls it, salvation. Maybe there's a kind of a logic that says, well, of course, this is going to teach us, when we open to it, it's going to teach us compassion.

[31:19]

It's going to teach us patience. It's going to teach us courage. It's going to teach us resilience. It's going to teach us how to dip into our own inner wisdom. and what beautiful gifts they are. And still, each day, as we stand, as Pablo Neruda says it, on the balcony of life, once again we're asked to spread our arms. And the interesting thing, when we do something quite literally beautiful happens.

[32:21]

Because that compassion, that patience, that resilience, that inner wisdom, they reveal something precious. They reveal the very process of being fully alive. they reveal something that, to some truth that tells us, even though tragedies, disasters, traumas, sectarian violence, you know, happen in our life, in our world, that something can hold that, that can be held, and that can contribute in the holding, can contribute to this deep appreciation for this life.

[33:33]

That when we meet each other with kindness, and let that be one of the principles we live by, something marvelous happens. Kindness begets kindness. With as much assurance as violence begets violence. That this very inner alchemy that shewn in the fire of impermanence offers us a way to reach out into the world and bring to it something that truly helps. that it's not simply a matter of our singular intentionality and purpose, that we can contribute to the collective, that we can receive from each other.

[34:38]

So as we go through our healing process here as a community, the tell-meet is not just an inner dialogue, it's a collective dialogue. that we will move forward together, that we will grieve together, that we will rediscover together, that we will learn that there is a reciprocity between inside and outside. that life is fierce and life is beautiful. The Norwegian Prime Minister, in his speech after that tragedy there where 77 people were shot by someone, he affirmed

[35:55]

principles that they try to live by. Openness, tolerance, peace. They had rallies where the people said, this is still what we do. This doesn't subvert it. This affirms its function. how can we be such one how like Mary Oliver can we say each year I return to the three things I say to myself I must do to love everything that is mortal to hold it to your bones as if your life depended upon it

[36:59]

And when it's time to let it go, let it go. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org. and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[37:35]

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